Stefan walked down the center of the street, constantly shifting his attention, looking for any additional people. He could feel the tension in the air. Whatever was going on was near to exploding. He stopped a few dozen yards from the scene, his revolver out but pointed at the ground.
“What’s going on here?” he called out, in a steady tone that he hoped wouldn’t startle someone into a regrettable action.
The circle of men kept backing away from the colored man. A few of them glanced toward him, but quickly returned their attention to the man huddled against the wall.
“Don’t get too close to him,” said the man with the pipe, “That’s one crazy jig—he fractured Larry’s skull!”
Stefan scanned the semicircle and saw that one of the men did have blood splattered around the side of his head, apparently a chunk torn out of his ear. Stefan looked at the Negro and saw that the man was unarmed, and looked on the verge of panic.
“He’s out there!” the Negro said, pointing a steady finger somewhere beyond the men encircling him. The arm he raised was splattered with blood.
One of the men raised a two-by-four as if to club away the pointing arm. Stefan raised his revolver and said, “Everyone calm down and drop the weapons.”
The one with the busted ear turned and said, “Who the hell do you think you ...” His words trailed off when he saw the revolver. The bottle he carried slipped from his hand to shatter at his feet, spattering his pants leg with the dregs it’d contained.
“The name’s Ryzard, Detective Ryzard. Now drop all the weapons.”
“Look,” said the first one who’d spoken, gesturing with his makeshift club, “This nigger—”
Stefan leveled the gun at the man. “Drop it.”
He backed away and dropped the pipe he carried. The others followed quickly, scattering their improvised weapons.
“I don’t care what happened,” Stefan said, “but I want all of you to beat it. Now.”
“But he—” the one with the ear motioned at the man they’d surrounded.
Stefan gestured with his head, keeping the gun steady. Slowly, way too slowly for Stefan’s taste, they started moving away. All of them kept watching the terrified man, as if he were suddenly going to erupt into some sort of life-threatening attack.
Within a few minutes he was alone with the man, who looked as crazed as ever. He was still whipping his head around, staring wild-eyed into the darkness. As if the fellas who’d encircled him weren’t even relevant.
Stefan took a deep breath and said, “Okay, now what’s the problem?”
The man turned his face toward him, the wild eyes staring into his own. It was as if this was the first time the man had noticed him. It was also the first time that Stefan had gotten a good look at the man. The look wasn’t encouraging. His face, from the cheekbones down, was shiny and wet. His teeth were stained dark red, as if he was coughing up blood.
“The devil is out here,” he said. “His bulls are walking the tracks.” He slid back along the brick wall, and with every step he seemed to shudder a little, as if he were in pain.
“Sure, sure.” Stefan smiled in a way he hoped was reassuring. He put away the revolver. This fella did seem to be half out of his mind. Stefan raised his hands, “But the tracks are down there. You’re up here.”
The man kept edging away, but his movements lost a little of their jerky, panicked edge.
“Those men I chased off, were they beating on you?”
The man shook his head as if he didn’t quite understand. “Get thee behind me, Satan.”
Stefan kept inching toward the man, trying to keep from spooking him into running. “I work for the Cleveland Police Department, but I’m no devil. I was an altar boy.”
The man started crouching, as if he thought Stefan meant to attack him. Stefan stopped approaching. The man shook his head and said, “Wicked, wicked.”
This close, the man looked really bad off. He was bleeding out of his mouth, his nose, and his ears, and his overalls were spattered with blood in a way that Stefan found particularly disturbing. He had the feeling that the man was leaking his life away in front of him.
He began cursing himself for chasing away this man’s attackers. If they were responsible for what happened, Stefan would never forgive himself.
“I have to get you to a hospital,” he said softly, and took another step. The man scrambled away and made a sound that was more a keening than anything else.
After a moment, Stefan said, “Our Lord, who art in heaven ...”
It worked. Some of the wildness leaked out of the man’s eyes, and he seemed, for the first time, to be able to really see Stefan. Stefan kept talking, “Hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come ...”
Through the prayer, he managed to walk up to the man without him scrambling away. When he reached him, and put a hand on his shoulder, the panic had been replaced by an expression of extreme weariness. The fear had been all that was holding him up. By the time Stefan reached him, he was collapsing to the ground, and it was all Stefan could do to get an arm around him.
The last coherent thing the man said was, “Pray for me.”
By the time Stefan got him to the car he was unconscious and barely breathing.
Hours later, in a hallway at St. Vincent’s Charity, Stefan leaned back in a chair and waited. He didn’t realize he had fallen asleep until he heard a doctor calling his name.
“Detective Ryzard ”
Stefan jerked his head upright, and the chair—which had been leaning back against the wall—obliged him by tilting forward, the forward legs hitting the linoleum with a crash.
“Yes, yes.” Stefan emerged from the chair, which seemed intent on pitching him onto the floor. One hand reached out to shake hands with the doctor, the other grabbed his hat which was spilling out of his lap.
The doctor took his hand and said, “I understand you brought the man in.”
Stefan nodded.
“You don’t know the man’s name? Have any idea who he is?”
“No, I don’t.” Stefan smoothed his hair and replaced his hat. “How’s he doing?”
“I’m sorry, he didn’t make it.” The doctor looked back down the hallway from where he’d come. Stefan looked at him and realized how young the guy seemed. Dark hair, Errol Flynn mustache, he looked like some actor pretending to be a doctor.
“Didn’t make it, ” Stefan thought. Weak set of words, right up there with “passed away.”
“How did he die?” Stefan asked, feeling a growing anger at the men he’d chased away earlier in the night. Also anger at himself for letting it happen.
“Well, it isn’t going to be a police matter, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“What?”
“Natural causes. He died because we couldn’t get his internal hemorrhaging under control in time before he bled to death.”
“I grabbed this fella from a circle of club-wielding nuts, and it’s natural causes?”
The doctor nodded. His eyes held a grave expression that seemed older than his features. “No one laid a hand on him as far as I can tell. No external trauma at all, no bruising, abrasions, broken bones—The man was sick, and suffered severe bleeding into the lungs, stomach, intestines—”
Stefan took a step back and said, “Good lord, what did he have?”
“I don’t know, which is why the patient’s history is important.” He shook his head and sighed. “But you just picked him up off the street, right?”
“Screaming about how the devil was after him.”
“He was delirious? Delusional?”
“That’s a word for it.”
The doctor shook his head again. “Maybe that might give me a lead on what was really wrong with him, before someone decides it was all TB and I shouldn’t be wasting my time on it.” He patted Stefan on the shoulder and said, “Go home, get some sleep.”
“Okay. You’re sure it’s natural causes?”
The doctor nodded. “Believe
it or not, people do die of that in this town.”
Stefan turned to leave and the doctor said, “One more thing. If you see anyone with similar symptoms, or find out anything about his history, could you contact me. Doctor McCutcheon.”
Stefan nodded. “Is whatever this is contagious?”
“I don’t know.”
Stefan shook his head and said, “I’ll give you a call if the Devil starts chasing me.”
As he left, he wondered if, in this town and with his job, he would be able to tell.
4
Monday, September 23
Edward Mullen worked long hours as a security guard at St. Vincent’s. It wasn’t a great job, but it was a job, and deep into the night it was peaceful. He sat behind a desk by the morgue, leaning his head on his hand and waiting for his shift to end.
The area was brightly lit and chilly, the tile walls reflecting light without heat. Mullen was used to it. Occasionally he would look up at the clock on the wall behind the desk and find that it was only another five minutes toward the end of his shift.
Nothing ever happened down here. The most exciting thing to happen this night was when they’d rolled down a fresh body.
Mullen was yawning, at about four in the morning, when he caught a shadow out of the corner of his eye. It was the size of a man, and was moving through the hallway.
Mullen stood up to greet the visitor. He was about to say something, but he was suddenly wrapped in an unaccountable feeling of dread.
The shadow strode through the hallway, shedding the bright light as if it never actually touched him. Mullen only had the impression of a tall man with long hair.
The man stopped in front of Mullen’s desk and looked down at him. It was as if the man had carried his own darkness with him, wrapping himself in it. Mullen had a sense of pale skin and blond hair, but he didn’t really see it. What he did see was the figure’s eyes. The eyes, colored red-violet that faded almost to black, seized Mullen’s attention. He couldn’t look away.
“You have something that belongs to me,” the figure said.
The words settled across Mullen’s brain like a brand. He knew that he stood in the presence of something evil. All he could do was nod.
The figure waved a hand at the doors which led to the morgue. The room beyond was empty of people, but Mullen heard movement inside. He heard the scraping of metal, and then suddenly the doors swung open.
Walking through them was the Negro, naked, blood still caked around his mouth and chest. Mullen recognized the corpse that had been wheeled in earlier in the evening. The body moved like an automaton, and Mullen wanted to shrink away.
Edward Mullen was frozen to the spot.
The shadow reached out a hand with long fingers and touched Mullen’s face. The touch burned like ice.
“You will tell everybody a story. You will not mention me.”
Edward Mullen looked deep into those blood-colored eyes and couldn’t conceive of refusing. At that point Mullen believed he was in the presence of the Devil himself.
At around six in the afternoon, Nuri Lapidos rode the Shaker Rapid home. He was just getting comfortable with the routine, a new city, a new job. Detective Ryzard was proving an able, if somewhat somber, introduction to the city and the department. Though the more he saw of the city, the more grateful he was for managing to find an apartment in the suburbs.
He was riding home, sometime between five-thirty and six, when the train began slowing down. Nuri looked up from the paper, slightly relieved to be distracted from the depressing stories coming out of Germany, and looked out the window. It wasn’t easy, he was on the aisle, and the man next to him was already craning his neck to see the commotion ahead that was causing the train to slow.
His seatmate wasn’t the only spectator. The train was passing through a valley, and before Nuri saw anything of the commotion on the tracks, he could see spectators lined up on the tops of the cliffs overlooking the tracks.
Nuri stood up, and finally could see the ground ahead of the train. He expected some sort of workmen fixing the tracks, but instead, he saw police. Three or four uniformed officers, and at least two detectives wandering around the underbrush at the side of the tracks, beneath a brush-covered hillside.
Curiosity had always been Nuri’s curse. He got up and made his way down to the conductor.
He pulled out his badge, “Can you stop the train and let me out here?”
The man scowled and looked at the badge. “You want out, here, now?”
Nuri nodded.
“Sheesh, well, I guess you paid your dime.” He pulled on a lever and the train started to slow even more. Before it’d rolled to a complete stop, the doors opened. “There you are, beat it.”
Nuri had to take a jump that almost cost him an ankle on the gravel. He stumbled away from the train as it began speeding up. Through the still-open door he could hear the conductor. “Give people a badge, and they think they own the damn railroad.”
Nuri watched the train slide by the scene ahead of him. He edged away from the tracks and started walking up to the two detectives. One was already starting toward him, apparently to see what the Rapid had disgorged.
They met about a hundred yards from the center of attention. “Can I help you?” the man asked. He was a tall man with a mustache, and he looked as if he was already irritated by the massing spectators.
“Hello,” Nuri held out the badge which was still in his hand, “Detective Lapidos, I was wondering if I could help you?”
The man extended a hand. “Orly May, and I guess you can. Me and Emil just got here about ten, fifteen minutes ago—well, let me show you.”
Detective May led Nuri to the focus of all the attention. Two men May said were Erie Railroad police were talking with the other detective, Emil. It was obvious what they were talking about before May led him into earshot. About ten feet from the policemen lay a man’s body, naked except for a pair of black socks.
At first he thought that brush was concealing part of the body, but as he closed on the scene he could see that the head wasn’t hidden by brush. It wasn’t there. As if to add insult to injury, the corpse had also been emasculated.
Nuri shook his head at the sight. Bodies he had seen before, but the mutilation made it more disturbing than it should have been. He felt light in the stomach. “That’s the first one,” May said to him. “What’s really creepy about all this is the lack of blood.”
Nuri nodded. The corpse was remarkably clean of all the violence done to it. “Almost as if the killer washed the body off before dumping it here.” As May nodded, the rest of what he said sank in. “You said ‘the first one’?”
“Over here,” May said, waving him over to a patch of thick scrub about thirty feet away from the corpse.
Nuri could smell it before he saw it, an acrid tinny odor that made his nose itch. Rounding the bush, Nuri saw the body of a shorter, older man. Laid out as carefully as the other body, arms at the sides, feet together. Just like the other, this man had been beheaded and castrated. Unlike the other, it looked as if the man had been dead for a much longer time. He mentioned it, and May nodded. “Both killed somewhere else, at different times. Which means the killer kept this one around for a while.”
Nuri suppressed a shudder and asked, “You ever see a body decompose like this?”
The body did seem oddly discolored, reddish, as if severely sunburned. The skin had become almost leathery. “Maybe some sort of preservative chemical,” May said, “so he could keep the body longer.”
Nuri took a step back and felt something crunch under his foot. He jerked, afraid he had stepped on some part of the body. He lifted his foot and breathed a sigh of relief.
“What is it?” May asked.
“Nothing, just a dead sparrow.” He kicked the thing, and its wings splayed like a fallen angel’s.
“Watch it,” May said, “We want to be careful we don’t miss any evidence—”
May was interrupted when
one of the railroad police called out, “I’ve found a head!”
The valley was called Kingsbury Run, and it cut through the east side of Cleveland like a knife scar between downtown and East Fifty-Fifth. It held the tracks that carried the Shaker Rapid lines, and all the passenger trains that passed through the Union Terminal, from the Chesapeake and Ohio to the Nickel Plate. At night it was an unlit haven for those transients with enough fortitude to risk the darkness and dangers of jumping a moving freight car in the gloom. During the day it was populated by strays, children, and dogs.
After five-thirty on September 23, 1935, a new population came to Kingsbury Run. Dozens of Cleveland police, detectives, and railroad police, began walking the tracks to discover anything related to the two headless bodies. The unrealized fear was that another corpse might turn up; the unrealized hope was that they might find some clue to the identity of the murderer.
They found the rest of the murdered men, the heads buried close to the bodies, and the genitalia had been tossed casually to the side, as if an afterthought by the murderer.
By evening, the police search up and down the Run had attracted an endless crowd of spectators lining the crest overlooking the murder scene. The ritual of the murder investigation was observed as intently as the procession of Catholic faith had been the night before.
Stefan Ryzard was one of the detectives who were not converging on Kingsbury Run. He had other business.
He stood leaning against the wall of an interview room while, sitting, handcuffed in a chair, was a man named Larry Alessandro. On the side of Larry’s head was a white bandage covering his ear, the center darkened slightly with blood.
“You ain’t got no right to hold me here!” he said for the dozenth time or so. Stefan simply nodded and said, “So you’ve told me. But you are here, Mr. Alessandro, so why don’t you just tell me what happened.”
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